In the communications industry, telephone line cords, which connect telephone handsets to a wall outlet, are provided to an installer in the form of a length of cordage such as, for example, that described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,868,341 that is coiled in a predetermined number of convolutions which are bound with a deformable tie. Free ends of the coiled cordage are finished or terminated with modular plugs, such as, for example, those illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,699,498 which issued on Oct. 17, 1972 in the names of E. C. Hardesty et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,148,539, which issued on Apr. 10, 1979 in the name of E. C. Hardesty. In the prior art, coil winding or hanking is shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,654,980.
Since the cordage is coiled desirably prior to end finishing, it becomes important for the coiled configuration to be maintained intact during the finishing operation. Prior art techniques exist for the application of a tie, e.g., a thermoplastic band, about the entire coil after the convolutions thereof have been elongated so that opposite portions of the convolutions are adjacent each other. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,024,580 and U.S. Pat. No. 2,349,750, which show the bending of upper extremities of U-shaped clip to become curled over adjacent convolutions of a wire entanglement. The introduction of a tie centrally of a coil and the wrapping of the tie about one section of the coil is shown on page 19 of Western Electric Technical Digest No. 34 April, 1974 issue. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 3,975,883 shows the coiling of cordage over a linearly disposed tie after which the ends of the ties are deflected upwardly and then inwardly and each tucked under an adjacent plurality of portions of the convolutions. While some of the just-described apparatus have been used, none has been found to have the kind of reliable, high speed capability which is needed in the environment of telephone cordage production.
Another problem evolves because of the desired continuous operation of apparatus for hanking cordage. Necessarily, a trailing end of one supply of cordage is spliced to a leading end of a next successive supply, usually by a staple. It should be apparent that any length of coiled cordage which includes a splice must be identified among the hanked cords produced by the apparatus so that it can be discarded and not end finished to avoid its inadvertant shipment together with acceptable product.
Notwithstanding the abundance of apparatus in the prior art for hanking strand material, the problems of automatically coiling and tying unspliced cordage at a high rate of production with methods and apparatus which result in successive cycles of operation without malfunction are seemingly unresolved. What is needed is a simplistic apparatus which requires a relatively low investment and which provides a cycle of operation and that has sufficient intelligence to alter its cycle of operation when processing spliced cordage. The sought-after apparatus should also be capable of bypassing steps for a normal sequence of operation and of repeating steps in which a malfunction may have occured before resuming a normal cycle of operation.